Adoption of sustainability reporting and assurance: a study among the top 300 cooperative and mutual organizations

Abstract

[EN] The relevance of sustainability reporting has greatly increased in recent decades, but the need to gain credibility has promoted companies to adopt assurance on sustainability reports. Prior research has analyzed these practices among stock companies. However, very few efforts have been made to develop a non-stock firm perspective. Social enterprises (e.g. cooperatives) have a special link with sustainability. Given the lack of previous studies, we aimed to analyze sustainability reporting and assurance among top cooperative and mutual organizations to find out whether adoption of reporting and assurance, and choice of assuror, were associated with factors country and sector. Our findings indicated that the cooperative and mutual organizations domiciled in stakeholder-orientated countries were more likely to adopt sustainability reporting and assurance, and to choose an accountant as their assurance provider. It seems that adoption of sustainability reporting and choice of assuror is associated with sector, with organizations in more sensitive sectors more likely to issue sustainability reports, and to hire non-accounting providers.